OLED material developer Cynora recently announced its first commercial product, the cyBlueBooster fluorescent blue emitter that is 15% more efficient that current fluorescent blue emitters on the market.
This was a very interesting announcement, and Cynora's CEO Adam Kablanian was kind enough to answer a few questions we had to help understand the new material and Cynora's current business and latest technology.
OLED material developer Cynora announced its first commercial product, a fluorescent blue emitter that is based on an "advanced molecular design" that is 15% more efficient that current fluorescent blue emitters on the market. Cynora brands its new material as cyBlueBooster, and it says it is currently available for commercialization in several shades of blue.
This could be very exciting news - while the whole industry is looking for next-generation emitters using TADF or PHOLED technologies, Cynora could have found an easier path to reduce power consumption by 15%. OF course a TADF or PHOLED emitter will achieve a reduction of 75% in power consumption compared to currently-used fluorescent emitters.
TCL and Juhua Printing demonstrated a 31" FHD inkjet-printed rollable hybrid QD-OLED TV prototype. The display uses an IGZO (Oxide-TFT) backplane and TCL says that it has an aperture ratio of over 50%, brightness of 200 nits and a 90% DCI-P3 color gamut.
TCL's hybrid display technology (which TCL calls H-QLED) uses a blue OLED emitter coupled with red and green QD emitters. All three emitter materials are combined and printed using ink-jet printing technology.
TADF, or Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence, is a relatively new class of OLED emitter materials that promise efficient and long-lifetime performance without any heavy metals. TADF research started at around 2012, originally at Kyushu University in Japan and today many academic groups and several commercial companies are developing TADF materials.
The main reason companies are interested in TADF emission is that it could lead to an efficient and long-lasting blue OLED emitter - something that hasn't been yet achieved by other means (mainly - UDC's Phosphorescent OLED emitter technology). In recent years companies initiated commercial development of red, green and yellow TADF emitters as these can offer a lower cost alternative to UDC's PHOLEDs materials.
A new company has recently been launched in Poland, to commercialize a new family of TADF OLED compounds. Noctiluca, which takes its name from a bio-luminescent marine creature, was established a few months ago with aims to be the world's first company to produce a commercial-ready blue TADF emitter.
Noctiluca's story begins with an innovative organic DSSC solar cell platform that was developed at Synthex, an organic chemistry development platform company based in Toruń, Poland. A few years ago the researchers turned their attention to light emitting materials (which are quite similar to the light harvesting materials used in solar panels) and intensive research culminated in a promising family of new TADF compounds - which was then spun-off as Noctiluca,
Taiwan's National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU) Professor Jou has been researching the hazards of blue light for many years, warning us against the hazards of modern lighting and focusing on OLED lighting as the technology that enables low blue-light emission lighting. In 2015, NTHU started to develop its low blue-light candle-light orange-type OLED technology, initially in collaboration with Wisechip and later with China-based OLED lighting producer First-o-lite.
NTHU has been promoting these candle-light OLEDs for the Smangus tribe in Taiwan's Jianshi Township which has been avoiding artificial light pollution. NTHU and the tribe managed to raise money to produce 240 OLED lamps, 90 for street lights and the rest to light up more than 100 cabins in the tribe's village. This is a beautiful project and hopefully will bring more attention to the hazards of blue light and the advantages of OLED lighting technologies.
LG Display announced that its OLED TV panels received an Eye Comfort Display certification from TÜV Rheinland, a global leader in independent inspection services.
LG Display says that its 65" OLED TVs emit 34% light, lower than TUV's 50% threshold. LGD says that the highest-spec 65" LCD panels emit 64% blue light. LGD's OLED TV panels met all of TUV's testing criteria and scored 0.87% in the light reflection category, which is half of that of LCD panels.
Universal Display reported its financial results for Q1 2019, with revenues of $87.8 million, an operating profit of $34.3 million and a net income of $31.5 million. UDC sees solid momentum in the OLED industry and it is raising its 2019 revenue guidance - to be in the range of $345 million to $365 million. UDC ended the quarter with $527 million in cash and equivalents.
Regarding its blue emissive system development, UDC says that it continues to make "excellent progress" in its ongoing development work. UDC still cannot predict when its blue OLED will be commercially available.
NTHU professor Jou has been researching the hazards of blue light for many years, warning us against the hazards of modern lighting and focusing on OLED lighting as the technology that enables low blue-light emission lighting.
In 2015, NTHU started to develop its low blue-light candle-light orange-type OLED technology, initially in collaboration with Wisechip and later with China-based OLED lighting producer First-o-lite.
In 2010 Universal Display announced a new AMOLED display architecture called RGB1B2 that uses two blue sub-pixels - a fluorescent deep-blue and a phosphorescent light blue. The introduction of a light blue sub-pixel can significantly extend the operational lifetime of an OLED display and reduce the display's power consumption by as much as 33%.
The RGB1B2 was never adopted (one of the reasons is that adding another sub pixel complicates the TFT backplane and has other disadvantages - but the architecture is now again on the table and UDC presented it again at OLED Korea 2019.
